Freelance (2023) - Movie Review

I’m not even going to lead into this with any kind of pre-amble: This is one of the worst films I have ever sat through. Even though we’ve still got a lot of films left to get through for 2023, I am absolutely certain that none of them will be worse than this. While I didn’t have the total out-of-body cringe experience with this that I did with Vacation 2015, the fact that I even thought to compare this with that should be a good indicator of just how fucking awful this thing is.

For a start, it’s a comedy where I didn’t laugh. Not even once. Not on accident, not because of the delivery, not even during the blooper reel. This is the film debut for writer Jacob Lentz, whose only real claim to fame is having written for over a thousand episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and he seems to be under the impression that he can rely entirely on the bankability of the actors to get any kind of chuckles. No real effort from his part, just assuming that everyone else has it handled. I think he’s too used to being in a writer’s room.

It's unlikely that good performances could save this script to begin with, but that's all academic since there aren't a lot of them here. John Cena as hired bodyguard Mason Petites looks like he’s scanning every inch of the scenery for a chance to leg it out of the movie, taking his character of a former soldier not wanting to get involved in another skirmish and turning it into someone who does not want to be here in any fashion. Then there’s Alison Brie as journalist Claire, who Mason has been hired to protect, and this is genuinely the worst performance I’ve ever seen her give. When she isn’t being properly annoying and antagonistic for no good reason, she is bland beyond belief. She looks like she could not care less about where she is or what she’s doing. To say nothing of how non-existent the chemistry is between them, both comedic and romantic, which likely goes to explain why the sexual tension never goes anywhere and Mason just returns to his estranged wife at the end.

But hey, maybe the action scenes will be fun; even Expend4bles managed that (sometimes). Well, they might have been, if they didn’t look like 2000s-era straight-to-DVD bargain bin filler. Director Pierre Morel, who most might recognise for making the original Taken (but who I mainly remember for his thoroughly unconvincing attempt to sell Jennifer Garner as a hardened action lead in Peppermint), completely phones it in here, mistaking the mere semi-regular presence of practical effects and stunts for doing them properly. That is, when he isn’t showing horrible CGI helicopters that make the POV introduction and other scenes look like Call Of Duty cutscenes trying to run on an actual potato.

Then there’s the horse chase… oh sweet bajeezus, this is some of the most incompetent shit I’ve seen in far too long. I’m almost impressed at how they found multiple ways to make this look bad. First off, the stunt doubling for Cena and Brie is embarrassingly obvious. Second, Cena is green-screened for most of it, with about the same fidelity as a dodgy driving scene. And third, there’s a quick-but-not-quick-enough shot of Brie where her face has been CGI’d onto her own stunt double. All distracting, all bad form, and all different kinds of bad form.

Oh, but we haven’t even gotten to the truly bad stuff yet. Yes, I’m being serious. That comes with Juan Pablo Raba as President Venegas, the leader that Claire is here to interview, and who runs his country as a dictatorship. Claire herself literally describes him as “the last pure autocrat in the Western hemisphere”. Now, Raba himself is easily the best performer here. He actually looks like he’s having fun (something that not even the blooper reel could show for anyone else, brief as it was), and he has a certain carefree air to him that makes it look like he’s channelling the charisma that everyone else should be exhibiting next to him.

However, him being the most likeable person here is not only a bit of an issue, considering he’s playing a military dictator, but also part-and-parcel with this film’s fucked framing of him within the story. Yeah, as bad as Lentz’s writing is when he’s trying to be funny, he’s somehow even worse when he’s trying to 'make a point’. He is presented as someone that Claire specifically wants to hold accountable for what’s going on, and he even reveals that he lets a terrorist cell run free in his country as a “steam valve” to help secure his own power. Kind of like how the Israeli government said "Hamas is an asset"; maybe that's why Alison Brie agreed to be in this.

Now, the film tries to show him on a correction path, with the finale describing him as making a reversal in how the government is run, and earlier explaining to his nephew (who tried to stage a coup against him) that “[they] don’t have to be monsters anymore”. This is the biggest load of telling and not showing of any film I’ve reviewed on here, as the rest of the film sure bends over backwards to excuse and even welcome his actions as a dictator. Even when we’re dealing with him before this supposed ‘change’, Claire openly gives Mason shit for giving Venegas a hard time, as if her own description of him alone wouldn’t be enough to make him look sketchy. They say that he’s leading a dictatorship, but they’re showing a fun, goofy guy that the audience is implicitly supposed to like and support, no matter what point on his fabricated arc he’s meant to be on.

Oh sure, the film makes a big deal about U.S. foreign intervention and the involvement of private military contractors, with Christian Slater (completely wasted in this thing, by the way) serving as the face of the supposed interference that the story is also highlighting as a bad thing. Except the end result of all this is that it presents a dictatorship as a ‘well, he’s not as shit as the other guy’ bit of compromise politics, which is quite the garbage take. And that’s the best case scenario; at worst, it's full-blown Dictator Lives Matter propaganda. Quite frankly, both of those options can piss right off.

And it can’t even commit to its own bootlicking! Along with the pretences made about Venegas’ supposed change of heart, the depiction we get of the U.S. military-industrial complex (through both Slater and Cena), for as much shit as the dialogue tried talking about how bad their interference is, ultimately shows them as the good guys. There’s also a moment where the film tries to be cute by showing that Claire has an anarchist A tattoo (in one of two immensely uncomfortable near-nudity scenes in this), part of what is implied to be a rebellious phase in her youth (because thinking unjust leadership is bullshit is just something you grow out of, apparently), which is meant to be part of the inspiration for her taking this gig in the first place. While, again, presenting autocratic rule as basically harmless with just a few killjoys that aren’t happy about the arrangement (personified by Marton Csokas as a warped clone of Mr. Smith from Kangaroo Jack, along with a lot of the same pro-autocracy logic in arguing against Venegas’ rule). If you're going to play PR games for dictators, at least do me the courtesy of not being a fucking coward about it.

Even if I put aside the total dumpster fire that is the politics of this thing (which, believe me, is not happening), this is still utterly devoid of merit. As a comedy, it isn’t funny. As an action flick, it’s not exciting. As a romance, it’s stillborn. As a technical production, it might as well be glued together. As a story, it’s basically The Lost City after it sacrificed its soul and became a lich. And not even a cool lich; the kind that all the other liches think is too dead on the inside. But that added spice blend of refusing to actually think through the implications of its story, and lacking conviction to even say what it can agree on with its full chest, really pisses me off about this. No, John Cena, I will not “Embrace the suck!” on this one.